Update: There are many solutions to the backup problem. We chose to look at CrashPlan—rather than Carbonite, Mozy, Amanda Enterprise, KineticCloud, the Tivoli Storage Manager, and others that we researched—because CrashPlan offered both better pricing and a better feature set than its contemporaries. So we set out to compare CrashPlan's features to its most prominent competitors. While this isn't an in-depth technical evaluation of the service's operation, it should give you enough information to know whether it might solve your backup-related woes.

We've recently spent a fair amount of time talking about cloud syncing solutions for PCs and mobile devices. In addition to syncing files and data across multiple devices, these services also provide as much off-site backup as most home users need. But power users and businesses often need more control than the typical cloud sync service can offer—whether it’s over what data is backed up and how, which users can use the service, how that data is secured both in transmission and at rest, or any combination of those flavors of control.

For users and system administrators who are less worried about syncing and more worried about keeping their data safe, a cloud backup solution could be the answer. Among cloud backup solutions, CrashPlan is one of the most competitive, both in features and in pricing. For consumers and small businesses, CrashPlan offers a range of versatile and highly configurable products that can back up client data to CrashPlan's cloud servers without requiring users to pay for and maintain their own file servers or network-attached storage devices. Larger businesses and enterprises can also back data up to CrashPlan's cloud, but are given the added option of creating their own on-site backup servers, which should calm security hawks distrustful of using other companies' servers to store important or sensitive data.

CrashPlan basics

There are a couple of reasons why CrashPlan sticks out among other cloud-based backup services: the first is that it is one of only a few to offer any kind of Linux or Windows Phone support—both of these are sort of niche features, but if you need them, that requirement automatically disqualifies Carbonite, Mozy, and a few other names. The second is in its pricing per gigabyte (illustrated in the tables below) which is superior to its competition in most circumstances whether you're a home or business user.

Where it does fall short, however, is in support for server backups. While KineticCloud, Amanda Enterprise, and Symantec Backup Exec.cloud all offer some support for backup of specialized servers like Exchange (and some even offer real-time backup for SQL databases that are in active use, for example), CrashPlan by its own admission has issues backing up such files.

Though the details sometimes differ, all versions of CrashPlan operate in the same basic way: using client software installed on the computer you want to back up, you specify what files you'd like to back up and where you'd like to back them up to. All versions of CrashPlan can use CrashPlan's hosted servers, but other versions can also back up to locally hosted CrashPlan servers, external drives, or even other client computers. Once backed up, you can use the client to restore files and folders to your system.

Selecting files for backup. Hidden files can also be backed up if desired.

CrashPlan clients are available for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. There are also apps available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that let you view and download any file stored on a CrashPlan server.

All versions of CrashPlan protect user data with client-side encryption. The paid plans encrypt files with 448-bit Blowfish encryption before transmission, and transmissions are protected by another layer of encryption. For CrashPlan+ and CrashPlanProE, that's 128-bit Blowfish; for CrashPlanPro, it's AES encryption. Users can specify their own passwords or 448-bit encryption keys from the client, meaning that no one at CrashPlan can actually access your data. The free version of CrashPlan uses (relatively) less-secure 128-bit Blowfish encryption to protect files.

Just a few of the settings available to CrashPlan users. These can be defined either in the CrashPlan client or, in the Pro plans, by system administrators.

CrashPlan also stands apart from other backup solutions through the power of its client software. Regular end-users can easily perform routine tasks like selecting files and folders for backup and restoration, but power users can also set their own encryption passwords, dictate how much network bandwidth and processor time the backup process can use when the computer is in active use and at idle, and even configure what networks the client can use for backup. You can get pretty specific with that last part—not only can you distinguish between different network media (wired Ethernet vs. WiFi or cellular, for example) but you can also choose between individual wireless networks (letting your computer back up while it's on your desk, but not while you're at Starbucks). The professional versions of CrashPlan also allow you to dictate default values for these settings.

Most backup clients either present a user interface that's so simple that it's restricting (like Dropbox), or so complicated that it's bewildering (like SpiderOak). CrashPlan does a good job of making user-facing functionality accessible while providing access to advanced options for power users and administrators.

Compared to competing home backup solutions like Carbonite and Mozy, CrashPlan+ comes out ahead in both pricing and supported platforms, with its one-year unlimited data plan undercutting all of Carbonite's unlimited data plan's and Mozy's 50GB plan. CrashPlan+ also supports both Linux and Solaris, while Carbonite and Mozy support just Windows and OS X (and Carbonite's OS X support, bizarrely, is limited to the bottom-tier plan).

The CrashPlan+ iOS client. You can download and view files from your backups with CrashPlan's mobile apps, but you can't re-upload them.

In the home, CrashPlan+ is also competing not just with older offsite backup vendors like Carbonite and Mozy, but also newer cloud-based sync services like Dropbox, which I’ve included here for comparison. Higher pricing per gigabyte makes the sync services less appealing for use as backup destinations for large amounts of data, but they’re also more flexible when it comes to accessing your data from multiple devices—in other words, there’s plenty of room for overlap here.

CrashPlan+ comes in a few different varieties—10GB and unlimited storage options for individual users, or a family plan that offers unlimited storage for up to ten computers in the same household or family (there don’t appear to be any geographical restrictions, as long as everyone is using the same ID and password and you don’t go beyond ten computers). In addition to being able to use cloud storage, external drives, and your other computers for backups, the consumer version of CrashPlan will let you create your own personal “cloud” with other friends using CrashPlan. Using either codes or email invites, friends can set up one-way or two-way backups between their systems, gaining many of the benefits of off-site backups without requiring you to pay CrashPlan to use their cloud. The real-world usefulness of this feature will depend on the quality and quantity of your friends, but it’s an interesting addition I didn’t see in any other products.

Show your friends you really care. Let them put their stuff on your computer.

The free version of CrashPlan strips the product of some of its most appealing features for home users—you can’t backup to CrashPlan’s cloud, and as we mentioned before, your data is encrypted with 128-bit Blowfish encryption before transmission rather than the 448-bit encryption used by the other products. You can still use it to store backups on external drives, your other computers, and your friends’ computers, so if your needs are simple you can still get by with it, but at that point it might be simpler to use built-in backup technologies like Windows Backup or Time Machine for simplicity’s sake.

I've been using CrashPlan for about a year and I love it. I'm backing up to their cloud, a buddy, and a local machine. I've been able to recover files often, and it's even allowed me access to files on a comoputer at home when I was on the road. The only issue I'm having now is that I can't get the Android client to log in. I haven't investigtated it too much though.

If you're looking for a good home backup system, CrashPlan is a good place to start.

I didn't see it listed, but does CrashPlan have any mail server backup functionality beyond a straight database copy? Granular backup and restore with incremental database backups would be a killer feature for smaller businesses with on site Exchange servers.

With that said, I use CrashPlan at home. I had to backup about 850gb of data from my media library and opted out of the hard drive service. it took a few months for the entire backup on my Comcast business line. But now that it is all there incremental backups are extremely fast and non-invasive. It's a great service especially for the $5/month.

CrashPlan really is very good though, and many of us specifically asked that it get covered during the cloud roundup, even though it's for a specific use-case rather then being fully general purpose. Backing up is really, REALLY important, and even amongst Arsians I have zero doubt there are many who are bad about it. CrashPlan is both cheap and good enough to be better then most of what the vast majority of people could put together on their own, and they have a lot of great features (like the hard drive preload option) that make it all very smooth. It's a good product for an important Arsian use-case and I have no problem with it getting covered.

I would however have liked to see Ars go into more depth for some of the bits people might be less familiar with, particularly generating one's own keys for use with the product. CrashPlan gets a key checkbox there by offering to let users provide their own, but plenty of people are probably not used to generating or storing them. That would have added some useful technical depth.

Have setup a few of the ProE servers before the change over to 3.2.1 and the interface now is just night and day different. CrashPlan has always been easy, especially for what it does and how powerful it is, but the new interface is just brilliant. Cannot recommend the free version enough to people with a home server and laptops. Cannot recommend ProE enough for any business that meets the 25 seat entry requirement (may have changed).

I guess we all got too good at pretending like Condé Nast's acquisition of ars wasn't going to end up like this.

These are exactly the kind of in-depth articles that Ars Technica has always been known for.

And they're right, Crashplan is that good. I have a family plan and I love it how I can back up my thumb drive and it doesn't delete the files if I remove the thumb drive from the computer like some backup systems said they did when I was doing my research.

Their support team has been known to reply in the forums from time to time which you can't say of all companies.

Actually, one doesn't need to wonder. It's a great product and service that sells itself fine, because people are asking all the time "what backup should I use" and a lot of us are in the position of needing to provide an answer. This sort of conspiracy crap is pretty ridiculous just out of the blue, with no evidence or analysis backing it up. I mean where do we stop? tecmec, this was your very first post on Ars. Should we wonder how much one of the competitors paid you to write it?

10GB, one computer: $1.50/month or $24.99/yearUnlimited, one computer: $3.00/month or $49.99/yearUnlimited, up to ten computers: $6.00/month or $119.99/year

This is quite deceptive and should be fixed. If it's really $1.50 a month, you're paying more for a year's service than you are just paying by month. Turns out that's it's actually $2.50 a month for 10GB, unless you by 4 years, at which point it's $1.46. Looks like CrashPlan's "As low as" gimmicks on their site even managed to trip up the author of this article.

Ars, while I am a CrashPlan user (formerly Mozy) and I love the service, this article drops all pretense of being objective and instead reads as a (in depth) technical advertisement for CrashPlan's services.

For shame. You keep this up and I'll look for objective news somewhere else.

Happy user of Backblaze here. $50/year gets me unlimited for one computer. Not sure why it isn't mentioned once in the article, because they've been around for a while, and a service like Dropbox isn't really comparable to Crashplan or Backblaze.

I was evaluating Crashplan for a company and sent an email to them requesting a quote and some technical questions. They never attempted to answer or reply at all for over 2 months. When I tried calling, no one picked up and their voicemail box was full during regular business hours. Their support was abysmal, so they were immediately dropped for consideration.

I was evaluating Crashplan for a company and sent an email to them requesting a quote and some technical questions. They never attempted to answer or reply at all for over 2 months. When I tried calling, no one picked up and their voicemail box was full during regular business hours. Their support was abysmal, so they were immediately dropped for consideration.

10GB, one computer: $1.50/month or $24.99/yearUnlimited, one computer: $3.00/month or $49.99/yearUnlimited, up to ten computers: $6.00/month or $119.99/year

This is quite deceptive and should be fixed. If it's really $1.50 a month, you're paying more for a year's service than you are just paying by month. Turns out that's it's actually $2.50 a month for 10GB, unless you by 4 years, at which point it's $1.46. Looks like CrashPlan's "As low as" gimmicks on their site even managed to trip up the author of this article.

Whoa, thanks for the catch, that is tricky. Let me take those "as low as" figures out of there.

It's possible that CrashPlan requested a review (and maybe even provided them with free use, like gaming companies do), but that doesn't necessarily mean the results are any less trustworthy.

Um, the service is not perfect. Email reports are shoddy and convey almost no information, application information on what is backing up currently and what is left to complete is minimal (compared to what Mozy tells you, at least) and the application can be a bit of a resource beast (and it will outright do nothing if your Volume Shadow Copy service is in a hung or unusable state), just to mention a few things.

We're sorry about that being confusing; that certainly was not our intention. We observed that some companies use the phrase 'starting at', which implies that is the highest price. We thought 'as low as' would make it clear that there are some conditions attached to getting that price (you need to purchase multiple years). We'll continue the search for better wording.

Actually, one doesn't need to wonder. It's a great product and service that sells itself fine, because people are asking all the time "what backup should I use" and a lot of us are in the position of needing to provide an answer. This sort of conspiracy crap is pretty ridiculous just out of the blue, with no evidence or analysis backing it up. I mean where do we stop? tecmec, this was your very first post on Ars. Should we wonder how much one of the competitors paid you to write it?

I'm both a long-time user of CrashPlan, and I'm also an Ars Subscriber. And yes, this does read like an ad for CrashPlan.

Yep, CrashPlan works very well, but I'd expect more from an article from Ars. Some kind critical analysis would be nice...? Backup times compared to the competition...? (Ideally with charts and graphs) What are actual users experiences...?

CrashPlan DOES handle system recovery better than Mozy though. I'm a former user of MozyHome and current user of CrashPlan and under both services I had main system hard drives die that required a reinstall of Windows and redownload of the client. (All of my data is stored on RAID drives separate from the OS/system drive, so no crucial data was lost).

When I reinstalled MozyHome, it registered a new PC and WIPED all of my current backups and made me re-upload all of my data again (as only one PC is allowed on a MozyHome subscription).

When I reinstalled CrashPlan, it asked me if the new installation was the same PC as it had on file, and I said "yes", recreated my backup paths and CrashPlan continued where it left off.

MozyHome may have resolved that little oversight in the year or so since I left the service, but it's something worth noting.

I've actually liked the free app for doing site-to-site backups of our accounting server (sent over VPN, so it's double encrypted-must be twice as hard to get ). Anyway, for that kind of thing it has been really nice-easy to use, and regular reports. It's just another level of backup, but given the cost, I couldn't NOT do it (really the cost was a separate hard drive for the remote server-easy to add, and easy to configure).

Plus it sends nice notifications. Again, non of this is particularly difficult to do with most software, but CrashPlan was really easy to set up.

That being said, I would have liked to see a shoot-out of the backup services (that doesn't include the Dropbox and Box options). This does read like a PR piece, and like the Iomega NAS article is a bit light on analysis and criticism. Maybe it's the just the author's style, but compare it to something from Peter and it might be more interesting and more informative with more critical analysis.

We're sorry about that being confusing; that certainly was not our intention. We observed that some companies use the phrase 'starting at', which implies that is the highest price. We thought 'as low as' would make it clear that there are some conditions attached to getting that price (you need to purchase multiple years). We'll continue the search for better wording.

Mike EvangelistCode 42 Software (home of CrashPlan)

As it's listed on your site, it's not bad. I wouldn't complain about that. It's just the translation from your site to this article lost the "as low as" qualifier, and the easily findable complete pricing information. Then coupled with the table comparing to other services, it was unfair. Now it's ok.

I'm both a long-time user of CrashPlan, and I'm also an Ars Subscriber. And yes, this does read like an ad for CrashPlan.

It feels like it's lazy, but not like an ad. The article deserves criticism for lack of depth and technical analysis, but leaping straight to "omg they were paid" doesn't even pass the smell test from a purely mercenary point of view.

Quote:

Yep, CrashPlan works very well, but I'd expect more from an article from Ars. Some kind critical analysis would be nice...? Backup times compared to the competition...? (Ideally with charts and graphs) What are actual users experiences...?

Same, as I said a lot more depth on subjects like crypto keys, resource usage and so forth would be much more in line with what we expect. But as a long time Ars reader that's not some brand new thing either. I can definitely remember shallow articles have always popped up from time to time in the past (years ago there was one bad author that very thankfully didn't stick around long who was just awful), and we've always called them out on it. That doesn't mean Ars calls companies up and offers quotes for article prices though.

I'm glad CrashPlan got coverage, but yeah the lack of criticism is weird. At least acknowledge that the interface is kind of clunky, yeah?

Also in Win7, it wants to start at boot. This would be ok, but I'm backing up to external storage (a WD Green drive + Rosewill USB dock), and I don't always have the dock connected and turned on. So CrashPlan freaks out a bit when its destination is missing. So, I have to go into Windows Services, and set it to manual, then start the damn service whenever I want to use it. It's pretty annoying, and I really wish they had some sort of "backup on demand" option. Maybe I'll switch to trying the built-in Windows backup...

Also, uploading is awfully slow over my TW cable connection at home. I'd like to back up my 100GB music collection remotely, but when I tried the free CrashPlan+ trial, it was clear that such an amount of data would take months and months to transfer to their servers. I know that's not CrashPlan's fault at all, but it's still the reason why I'm not paying for what otherwise sounds like a great service.

I've been using CrashPlan since October last year and I'm pretty happy with it. We have four computers in the family (two Windows, two Macs) so we're on the family plan. We use it to back-up data locally and to the Crashplan servers. It's unobtrusive and it gets the job done.

I've had to recover files from their backups on two occasions (both times where my son screwed up) and the recoveries went without a hitch.

My only bitch is that they take a long time to answer emails - in my experience it runs from 4 to 7 days.

I have no issue with Crashplan. Even before this article, it looked like a great service I was considering using because yes, backup is very important. But ever since ars' redesign, we've had articles like this, and this abomination, which, in my worthless opinion as one of many long-term ars users, suggests a definite shift in tone and depth in the writing and what is being covered. I don't like the way it's going, which is a shame, because I loved the redesign. I'm not one of these people who has an aneurysm every time Facebook updates its layout. But here I think ars is clearly having to justify its existence more in terms of profit than ever before. I only ever subscribed for one month though, so I have less of a right to complain, but if I was a long-term subscriber I know I'd be pissed.

Isn't there some alternative way of advertising payment plan features?

In my mind that layout has been hijacked by file locker websites telling me I have to wait 5 mins to dowload my friend's song. To me seeing those things is a serious blow to a product's/business' credibility.

Just an opinion of course, and maybe im the only one in the world who sees those things and thinks scam.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.